Conservatives put marriage at heart of their families Green Paper

3 February 2010

Former Conservative leader and Chairman of the Centre for Social Justice, Iain Duncan-Smith accused Labour of inflicting ‘grave damage’ on the family, as the Tories launched their families Green Paper.

Mr Duncan-Smith claimed that ‘All the evidence shows that children brought up in two-parent families do far better in life’, and outlined a series of facts and figures to illustrate that Britain is ‘broken’:

• Over 40 per cent of children are now born outside marriage.
• Intentional harm has risen 34 per cent in the last 4 years.
• The UK has the 4th highest teenage pregnancy rate in the world.
• Alcohol consumption by UK children has doubled in the last 15 years; 1 in 4 children now take drugs, compared to 1 in 20 twenty years ago.
• Children living in single parent or broken families are far more likely to experience serious abuse than those living in two-parent families;
• Labour has scrapped all recognition of marriage in the tax system and in most official forms. It has also distorted the benefits system to make it more profitable for couples with children to live apart.
• Britain is the only country in the advanced world, bar Mexico and Turkey, not to recognise marriage in the tax system.

‘Most shocking of all, the government now admits that 200,000 children live in homes where there is a known high risk case of domestic abuse and violence. The figures also show that a child living with a non-biological father is eight times more likely to be on the “at risk” register and 50 times more likely to die from injuries inflicted by an adult living in the home,’ Mr Duncan-Smith added.

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